The fight between cataphiles and police in the Paris catacombs

[jmcomets]

Another fact not mentioned in this article is the WWII historical locations found in the unofficial Catacombs. Back when I lived in Paris, I was lucky enough to know someone who had access to one of the Cataphiles' maps (yearly-updated with notes on entrances and potential police patrols, with closest exits and dangerous passages).

We visited an old school basement, which was used as a bunker for members of the Resistance. The school itself was razed and rebuilt over at some point, but the Catacombs still hold traces of this period. Being there felt very...intimate. Nothing like you'd see in a museum or a documentary, we were in the same place as those back then.

[Aromasin]

I had a very similar experience. I used to do a lot of "urban exploring" in the UK, and as part of that, I visited Paris for it with some friends. We went with a guide I met on a forum to a secret resistance shelter recently uncovered at the time, and there was still litter from the 1940s. Old cigarette and match boxes, wine bottles, old posters and the like. It was exactly as you describe; intimate, in the way that visiting a mausoleum or cathedral is compared to a museum. I'm sure it's been picked clean now, but the memory will stick with me forever I suspect.

[Scoundreller]

Some really old (some 10 years old, wow, geriatric on the web) websites still hosted by free.fr:

http://catacombes.web.free.fr/

http://exploration.urban.free.fr/carrieres/indexus.htm

[a_nar]

I've never heard of free.fr. Is there some sort of a special backstory?

[olalonde]

I highly recommend this video on a group of cataphiles who setup a temporary movie theater and bar in the catacombs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auI8QkL74S8

[ornornor]

> Carthusian monks converted the ancient quarries under their monastery into distilleries for the green or yellow liqueur that still carries their name, chartreuse.

Is that right? Chartreuse is named after the eponymous mountain in the alps, on the other end of the country and it’s been made there for ages because it’s made out of plants and herbs that grow nearby and nowhere near Paris.

[joloooo]

There's a good couple of chapters on the catacombs in Robert Macfarlane's book The Underland (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53121631)

[SliceOfWaifu]

I just rewatched "As Above So Below" the other day. Didn't know messing around in the catacombs is something people actually did in real life.

[kylebenzle]

Sad to see they are planning on filling them up with concrete:(

[johncoltrane]

No one is planning to do that. Filling entry points with concrete, though, which is what the article is referring to, has been standard practice for a long time. And breaking up those large blobs of concrete has been a core activity of cataphiles for as long as it happened.

I was not a cataphile but, like lots of locals, I used to go down there almost every week-end in the mid-to-late 90s. The times of large decadent parties were already over by then. You could still meet a surprising number and variety of people but the "ambiance" was not as romantic as you might think from reading the article: the IGC was doing crackdowns and blocking entry points, the cataphiles were very hostile to other visitors, and the few "parties" that still happened at "La plage" or elsewhere where really a handful of people smoking weed.

The catacombs were a pretty cool playground to have, that's for sure, but let's not exaggerate its cultural importance.

[andrewflnr]

Sounds more like divided into sections by concrete walls than actually filled, which would be, uh, definitely not climate friendly.

[anigbrowl]

We had to destroy or heritage in order to save it?

[t0lo]

Catacombs isn't the first thing I'd think of when I hear the word 'cataphile'

[ycombinete]

I 100% thought this was going to be about catamites and the police in some bygone age.

[dtgriscom]

I went to feline-o-philia.